A dimly lit cloud of a shadow of doubt

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Margaret Atwood was interviewed at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015. I have only read one of her books, The Handmaid's Tale, and as we know, it's a depressing and scary book. Considering that, the interview was surprisingly (to me) light-hearted and revolvedheavily around popculture. I got an impression that Margaret Atwood is quite engaged with it. She participates in art / experimental projects that revolve around books and reading.

One of such projects was the Future Library in Oslo. It was started by an artist Katie Patterson. In May of 2014 she planted 1000 trees near a forest in Oslo. These trees will grow for a 100 years. Every year a different writer from around the world, invited by a committee, each writing in a different language and different genre, will contribute a manuscript in a sealed box to the future library. 100 years later all the boxes will opened. There will be enough wood from the trees that have grown to make paper to print the anthology of those stories.

As Margaret Atwood explained, the stories can be in any form: one word, a poem, a short story. No images. And you cannot tell anybody what is in the box, except for the title. But these boxes will be in the future library with the author's name and title visible. You can go into the library, see the names and titles and imagine what could be in them. "So in May (of 2016), I'm going to Norway with my box, tied with a nice blue ribbon," said Margaret Atwood. "I imagine there might be a moment at the immigration checkpoint where they're going to ask me what is in that box, and I'm going to have to tell them, I don't know," she said, adding that that might not go over well.

She also noted that the success of this project was based on a number of assumptions: that people will want to read and will be able to read, that Oslo will still be there. (Not to mention an even more questionable assumption that books in a hundred years will still be printed on paper -- E.)

Margaret Atwood seems to encourage all the ways in which people consume and produce the written word nowadays, including mashups and remakes. For example, she wrote her own version of Shakespeare's play "Tempest" for the Hogarth Shakespeare project, in which modern writers reimagined Shakespeare's works. She had a fan fiction contest for her latest book. (And no, she replied, she wasn't going to read all the thousands of entries herself. She had slush readers for that.) When asked if she was ready for other people to take over her characters, she indicated she had no problem with that. She said: "Fanfiction is very very old, except it wasn't called fanfiction. It started with the Greek mythology. When Don Quixote was published, there were a lot of other books published about Don Quixote by other authors. So Cervantes had to put out a notice that those other books aren't authentic."

She also contributed, even if in a small way, to the Zombies, Run! app. It's an interactive app for exercise, based on the premise that a zombie apocalypse is taking place, and you are running from the zombies. At one point the run takes you to Canada, but the entire Canadian government has been zombified, and the entire NHL hockey league are zombies on skates. However, you can establish contact with Margaret Atwood. Naomi Alderman, co-creator of the Zombies, Run! app, wrote her into the game. The way Margaret Atwood explained it, "I'm a pushover. You want to put me in a zombie game? Okay."

Margaret Atwood (left) at the Texas Book Festival in October of 2015, surrounded by the audience members.

Despite the lighthearted tone of the conversation, the interviewer couldn't help but note that we were at the Texas Capitol, the place where Texas Legislature makes laws -- and some or many laws that they passed recently resonated strongly with the themes in Margaret Atwood's most famous dystopian novel "Handmaid's Tale". You could get an impression that Texas Legislature used "Handmaid's Tale", um, aspirationally. So, not surprisingly, the interviewer brought up political topics.

"Margaret, you do a lot of advocacy work. And we are in the Texas state capitol, so I want to ask you about how far we have come and how far we have to go," said the interviewer, Kelly. (I don't remember her last name -- E.)

Margaret Atwood quipped something about making a law from here. (The interview took place literally in the House Chamber of the Texas Legislature. All the audience were sitting at the lawmakers' desks.) Then she said:

"The people who passed it (referring, I think, to a recent law severely restricting availability of abortion -- E.) don't think about the effect there will be down the line. Real people will have to live with these things. The effects will turn out to be not what they thought to be. For example, California reversed its draconian prison legislation because they couldn't afford it. I don't think you can really sustain the society if you alienate a lot of young people, because they're going to move somewhere else, and then who's going to pay for your old age? If you are prohibiting abortions, you may think that there will be lots of babies born, lots of poof children, future serfs? That might not work out that way."

As usual, there was time for audience questions.

A question from the audience. Oslo is building huge library, but a few hundred feet from here there is a huge library that's mostly empty, there's nobody there. (I think he might have been referring to the Austin Public Library central location. -- E.) So why do you think that the Oslo Future Library be successful?

Margaret Atwood replied that some libraries were very heavily used, for example, the New York or Toronto public library systems. "So I don't think it's a question of library or no library, it's a question of what kind of library, how accessible it is, and what kind of interactivity do they do? I believe that access to books and reading is one of the cornerstones of the democracy," she said.

A woman from the audience says she's getting her PhD in literature, and (if I understood correctly) is teaching literature to freshmen. Making them read feels like she's murdering them. She asks if Margaret Atwood sees it a general rule of thumb for this generation (unwillingness to read), and if so, does she have any advice?

Margaret Atwood. Freshmen read all the time. You can't use internet without being able to read. There is a place where they can write anonymously, and post what they're really interested in, which may be vampire stories. Another way you can help them is audiobooks. But sometimes they just want to put in the studying time. When I was teaching grammar to engineering students, I started them on Kafka's parables, which are very short. So you can start your students on flash fiction. They're all 18, it's a difficult age. When I taught the same class to returning students, there was a huge difference. They wanted me to challenge them, they argued with me.

Make your students write a zombie or vampire story. Or an article of economics of vampires. Vampires are always rich. Why is that? They are immortal -- if they became a vampire in 1930, how much money you have accumulated? Have them do a business plan for being a vampire. There are two vampire movies where this accumulation of the riches is done explicitly. 1. An Iranian vampire western movie called "A girl walks home alone at night" - a feminist Iranian vampire, who was killing only bad people, but in the process she accumulated a lot of diamond watches. 2. "Let the right one in", with a 12 year old girl vampire. There is a classic line in it: a little boy says to her when he [starts suspecting something]: 'How old are you really?' She replies: 'I'm really 12. I've been a child for a very long time.'"

A woman from the audience. What words of comfort you have for readers who know they'll never lay their eyes on your contribution to the future library?

Margaret Atwood. There are many books you'll never lay your hands or eyes on, because you've never heard of them. As a tribute to that idea, find a book you never heard of, read it, and find other people who love it.

Friday, December 15, 2017

Subtitled "Escape From Clichea", Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop was the most remarkable event at the ArmadilloCon 2016, and was alone worth the price of admission. She gave a heap of good, practical, doable recommendations on how to improve your worldbuilding, storytelling, and characters. At a typical writing workshop you'll get vague advice like "show, don't tell", and "kill your darlings", but rarely will you hear specific recommendations what to do. But Tex Thompson's workshop was an avalanche of such implementable nuggets of goodness. She showed us how to look at your story material differently and tease the interrestingness out of it.

To be sure, this wasn't the kind of workshop where professional writers and editors critique your manuscript. This was 1.5 hours of Tex Thompson speaking. But I came out of it full of ideas of how to make my stories better.

I wrote them down to the extent I remembered them.

The workshop wasn't strictly just about worldbuilding, but also covered deeper aspects of writing, like how to find your identity as a writer, how to find what makes you unique, and use it to build your online presence.

Write down 3 things you have been paid to do. Then 3 things you could write an article about. If the things on those lists have nothing to do with writing, that's completely fine. Those are things that make you unique. They help you stand out between other writers. If nothing else, they could give you ideas for your blog posts, and a blog is a big part of how a writer attracts and keeps an audience.

Here is another way to mine ideas for blog posts.

Write a list of 3 stories that you want your work to be compared to. Then write down common elements between them. For example, Tex Thompson said that for her, those elements are: (1) ensemble cast / team effort; (2) people with different abilities or powers; (3) big, wild, slightly-ruined world. Such elements are great for mining ideas for your blog or convention panel topics. For example, combining (1) and (2) could lead to Top 10 teams in comics.

Triforce consists of: Education - something you know about; Passion - something you care about; Inspiration - something you are excited about. At the intersection of those things is a story that only you can write, says "Tex" Thompson.

Ask yourself: "what is the easiest, laziest thing I could do here?" Then do something else.

Start with Episode IV, and leave space for more stories as you go.

What happened in Harry Potter world before the HP started? All the Voldemort stuff, the Marauders. Your idea for the front story might make an awesome back story.

Question your assumptions.

Have you read a story about space travel that's set in the 25th century, but all the gender norms are from the 20th century? Or they have all the same notions of nuclear family and property?

Everything that surprises you about another country / culture says something about your own. There is a book series CultureShock! that explains how to live in another country. In US it says, don't drop off at someone's house uninvited. It's OK to ask what people do, but not how old they are. You can call uninvited, but not after 9 pm. Never cut in line, that will not be good to you.

Give us something we expect and something we don't.

Many enormously successful TV and book series do that. Star Trek: a Western but in space. Game of Thrones: medieval fantasy, but gritty / realistic. Harry Potter: witches / wizards, but in high school. Another example. Chuck Wendig once asked: what would a vampire do in a zombie apocalypse? In "Double Dead", the vampire tries to make sure that the human race does not go extinct, because then he'll be out of food. So he herds human survivors through the apocalypse.

In any scenario, ask:

Who benefits from the current state of affairs? Who tends to benefit in most zombie apocalypse stories? Zombies, warlords, gritty surrivors. Even in the worst of times somebody turns a profit. Doomsday preparers, escaping prisoners, drug companies? Gun manufacturer Colt?

Who loses out? Who is the first to go? The slow and the sick. The people on the front lines where the apocalypse started -- hospital workers who got blood sprayed on them. They are gone.

Who's trying to maintain the status quo? Usually people who are winning, or people who think they are getting a better deal than they would otherwise. How many of you stayed in a crappy job because its certainty was better than the uncertainty of the alternative?

Who is trying to change things? Someone who is losing, who has nothing left to lose.

Explore the timeline

While my memory of the workshop is already vague, I think this was a segue of the "vampires protect people from zombies" exercise. I assume this all means not that we, writers, need to explore all these time periods in our prose, it's just that perhaps the story could be built around not the event itself, but what happened n number of years later.

3 months later: chaos, social collapse, ragtag survivors

10 years later: status quo; the world is relatively stable. But what are we doing now that we weren't doing 3 months after the event? Maybe we are enslaving zombies. We have started to adapt to this new world.

50 years later: the idea that there was something before this seems strange. You still have people who remember the old world, Kennedy's assasination, the days when presidents used to drive down the street in open convertibles. But also the current generation may not know or appreciate reasons for the current state of affairs. This leads to a possibility of a new conflict. They have no respoect for their vampires-elders. They don't understand why people submit to the vampire lords.

100 years later: nobody remembers the way it was. Nobody alive today remembers the flu pandemic of 1918. From the 50s to the 90s our big preoccupation was the cold war and the Bomb. Now everybody has a bomb. We don't worry about Russians launching nukes so much. We are worried about people sitting next to us in a movie theatter. The Great War doesn't come up so much as it does in the fantasy novel prologues.

When Tex Thompson teaches at the DFW writers workshop, she tells writers: don't pack me a lunch, leave me breadcrumbs. If your mom packs you a lunch, you'll throw away the apple, trade the cookies, etc. You are more like T-Rex: you don't want to be fed, you want to hunt.

Give readers just enough information about your world to build something of their own

Consider how many bigger-than-big franchises -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon -- give you enough information so that you can create your own Jedi, superhero, wizard school, etc. And they make the world vast and intriguing enough that you would WANT to! Ask yourself: what am I giving my readers to do while they wait for my next book? Fan theories about what is Jon Snow's real heritage, Rey's from Star Wars real heritage, etc. Can they make a costume of a character? In how many ways can they participate in this world? In what ways can you make it exciting to participate?

Tex Thompson enjoyed Harry Potter, but like many fantasy novels, the main character was a dude. She wanted to make her own hero. For example, in the world of Sugar Rush racers, who are all named after candy, Tex's friend made his own Sugar Rush racer, Molten Milk Toast. Does your world accommodate other heroes? Do you establish your world well enough for your fans to actively participate in it? And is it interesting enough that they would want to? If your wizard school is in UK, would the readers wonder what it would be like in the Caribbean?

A guy in the audience. Leave the rules a little open, that the people would wonder how much is possible.

Tex. Right. We need some rules at the outset, but we don't need them all right away. And a lot of the secret sauce is what is the right order of revelations so that they would let people build upon one another, etc.

"Use the Triforce, Luke! Triforce consists of Passion, Education, or Inspiration -- in other words, something you care about, something you know about, and something you are excited about. At the intersection of these three lies a story only you can write. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

Problem: infodumps are boring

Solution: do not let your story answer any questions the reader hasn't had time to ask!

Give out world details and exposition like treats. Instead of infodumping an explanation of how the star drive work, ask yourself, what question is that an answer to? The question probably comes up when the star drive is broken and needs to be fixed. "We need a new flux capacitor, or else the discombobulator won't work."

What excuse do they make for explaining magic in Avatar the Last Airbender? "Why is so-and-so special? Why can he control all 4 elements?"

Anything you are tempted to go on and one for 100 pages about, make it the focal point of your story. Make your story about how to survive on Mars, and hundreds of pages on growing potatoes will become relevant.

Problem: making a fictional world as detailed as the real wone would take forever, and also be super boring. What should you do?

Answer from the audience. Use the same cliches as in the real world?

Tex. Yes. Use the words "magic wand". Readers already know how it works. Or "hyperdrive". Everybody knows what it is.

You don't want to include things that are not relevant, things that have no emotion attached to it. But if I tell you what magic the blue crystal does, what will you automatically wonder about? What other crystals are there, and what magic they do.

Solution: imply that your world contains more detail than is explicitly given in the book.

Conservation of detail: if something is explained in depth, it's because it's somehow important to the story. (The Malazan series by Steven Erikson stomp on this idea. He explains everything about everything.) Respect your readers' brain cells. If I ask the reader to spend a brain cell, there should be a reward for it.

Using the real world responsibly

How to avoid stereotypes

In real life we have stereotypes about entire nations, about some states or even some cities. In fantasy it is easy to fall into the same pattern. Elves have stereotypes about orcs and vice versa. Their races do not get along. But in reality, within any nation, people are quite different from one another. There is enough internal variation between elves and between orcs. In real world, your biggest beef is usually not with the person across the ocean, but with a person across the street. Your fantasy world will be more detailed if you tell us what elves fight among themselves about. Is it what type of wood is best for bow crafting? Is it something as silly as what end of an egg to open from breakfast?

What kinds of people tend to get left out this kind of story? Can you find a way to include them?

Going back to the vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse example, what kind of people don't make it through a zombie apocalypse? The elderly and the sick. One of Tex's friend had said: "Why would I want to read stories about apocalypse? If power goes out, my fridge goes out, I won't get my insulin and I'll die. So why would I want to read it?"

One of the plot threads in your book could be about how a guy with diabetes makes it through the apocalypse. Will the vampire take care of him personally? Will he the vampire hunt pigs to make insulin?

Make a story that includes a category of people who are not commonly included, and you might have a whole new big group of fandom for yourself.

Smash the Monoliths!

Question. What is the easiest, laziest, most obvious, least-realistic thing I could do with my fictional people?

Answer. Create a monoculture.

You are probably wondering: but what if I mess up? What if I write a character outside of my own experience and get it wrong? Don't worry, says Tex: you WILL mess up. No matter what you write, someone will hate it. There is a famous quote: "If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important." Use your fear of hurting people (from other cultures or marginalized groups) to motivate you to do your research. Listen to people, and solicit feedback -- even painful feedback.

The following year I had the fortune to attend another of Tex Thompson's workshops, "Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue". It took place in Austin in July 2017, and focused on dialogue. Your characters are constantly in motion: they clash, collide, fold, buckle, shift. Good dialogue expresses all that. Here are some of the slides from the dialogue workshop

Sunday, October 29, 2017

We have heard that quantum computers are supposed to be much faster than classical ones. But what exactly does that mean, and why can't computers based on some other exotic physical models of computation be as fast? Scott Aaronson examined other models of computation and dispelled some popular myths about quantum computing at the Austin Quantum Computing meetup in May of 2017.

His talk might not have had a whole lot of new stuff for those who read his blog. It was a tour-de-fource of the topics he often addresses on his blog, and a synopsis of what a layperson needs to know about quantum computing. It was about what makes quantum computing so fascinating, but also how to keep your expectations of it realistic.

Scott started his talk with a look at some hypothetical alternative forms of computing. What physical models of computation would be alternative enough to violate the Extended Church-Turing thesis?

Church-Turing Thesis is closely related to the definition of computability: it says that all the computable functions are those and only those that could be computed by the Turing machine. Extended Church-Turing Thesis says that a Turing machine can simulate all other computers with at most a polynomial overhead. Are there forms of computing that challenge the extended Church-Turing thesis? On what kind of physics could a computer possibly be based to overturn it? Scott examined hypothetical computers based on exotic conditions where everyday laws of physics break down.

Scott's first example was a relativity computer. How come no one talks about relativity computer, he asks. The idea is simple: you start your computer working on some really hard problem, maybe NP-hard problem, and leave it on Earth, while you take off into space. From the computer's perspective, billions years have passed, the civilization has collapsed. But from your perspective, thanks to the relativistic time dilation, only ~ 20 years have passed. You come back and miraculously find your computer in the rubble, still connected to a power source, and you can read out an answer to your hard computational problem. So why hasn't anyone tried it? If you're worried that your friends will be dead in the distant future, just bring them on the spaceship with you.

Humor aside, the question is, would such a "relativity computer" (well, in this case the computer is ordinary, it's you travelling at a relativistic speed that makes the answer appear quickly) provide a fast solution to NP-complete problems? Would the problem be solved in polynomial time from your perspective?

The answer to that, Scott says, has to do with the amount of energy that would take to accelerate to relativistic speed. If you want to get an exponential speedup in only polynomial amount of time as experienced by you, you would have to accelerate so close to the speed of light that would take exponential amount of energy. So before your spaceship takes off, just fuelling it up would take exponential time.

It can sometimes seem like you could achieve exponential speedup for some problems by exploiting certain physical processes, but to really evaluate any such possibility you have to look at everything we know about physics, such as the energy involved in such a calculation.

Zeno's computer is a hypothetical computer in which each operation would take only half the time that it took for the previous operation. This scenario could occur at the so-called Omega Point. Omega Point is a theological notion, but according to some physicists, it could occur under some highly debatable conditions. (I don't think Scott mentioned Omega Point in his speech, I just remembered this trope because it seemed fitting.) For example, the founder of quantum computing, David Deutsch, envisions Omega Point happening near the time of the Big Crunch, as the universe oscilates faster and faster. By the time the universe collapses, the computations have achieved nearly infinite speed, and if you simulate the whole universe on the computational power of those oscillations, the world will never end for you. The closer the real thing comes towards the end, the faster the oscillations will go, the longer "subjective" time you'll be able to simulate. Here is a quote from the David Deutsch book "Fabric of Reality" where he discusses Omega Point. Scroll down to the paragraph "The key discovery in the omega-point theory...".

On the Omega Point computational substrate you would be able to solve NP-hard problems fast. But according to our best cosmological models, the universe is not going to end in the Big Crunch. Even aside from this particular scenario, Scott points out a fundamental problem with Zeno's computer. Zeno's computer relies on infinite amount of computational capacity, but any space-time region has only a finite number of information storage capacity. He says so in his own comment on his blog:

Mathematically, if we know that a problem only requires enumerating a finite list of possibilities, then essentially by definition that problem is computable. This is why, any time you see a new problem that's been proved at least as hard as the halting problem, that problem will always involve some element that goes to infinity (if the title and abstract aren't forthcoming about this, read the main text and see! ?? ).

Physically, it's conceivable that we could have lived in a universe where an infinite amount of stuff could get done in finite time (e.g., by what I call the "Zeno Computer," that does one step in 1 second, the next in 1/2 second, the next in 1/4 second, and so on). In such a universe, of course the halting problem could be solvable in finite time.

But the current conjecture in theoretical physics -- primarily because of the work of Jakob Bekenstein on black hole thermodynamics, which I blogged about before -- is that we don't live in such a universe. Rather, we seem to live in a universe that can be modeled as a quantum computer where each finite region of space stores at most ~1069 qubits per square meter of enclosing surface area (with the bound saturated only by black holes), and where those qubits are operated on at most ~1043 times per second. In such a universe, of course the halting problem would not be solvable."

While no one has tested this directly, it appears from current physics that there is a fundamental limit to speed, and that it's about 1043 operations per second, or one operation per Planck time. Likewise, it appears that there's a fundamental limit to the density with which information can be stored, and that it's about 1069 bits per square meter, or one bit per Planck area. (Surprisingly, the latter limit scales only with the surface area of a region, not with its volume.)

What would happen if you tried to build a faster computer than that, or a denser hard drive? The answer is: cycling through that many different states per second, or storing that many bits, would involve concentrating so much energy in so small a region, that the region would exceed what's called its Schwarzschild radius. If you don't know what that means, it's just a fancy way of saying that your computer would collapse to a black hole. I've always liked that as Nature's way of telling you not to do something!

One of the few things about quantum gravity that everybody agrees on, says Scott Aaronson, is that it places fundamental limits on how much computation you place in a bounded region.

Sometimes people suggest that soap bubbles could solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time just by finding the minimum surface when they are connected. Finding the minimum surface for connected soap bubbles is an NP-hard problem, but humans have observed that soap bubbles form a minimum surface very quickly, thus prompting the idea that a polynomial-time algorithm for finding the minimum surface does exist. And if we could encode an NP-hard problem as a soap bubble problem -- in effect "feeding" it to a soap bubble computer -- then we could solve them in polynomial time.

The problem with it is that bubbles do get stuck in local optima, says Scott. In other words, the surface they settle into is not guaranteed to be the absolute minimum but some kind of local minimum. Scott talks about it in more detail in his paper "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality" (PDF).

In his teens, Scott experimented with the surfaces soap bubbles form. That was the closest in his life that he had ever been to an experimentalist. And in his experimments the bubbles got stuck in local optima. "But I haven't tried every possible brand of soap," Scott quipped.

Same is true about using protein folding for solving NP-complete problems. Finding optimal configuration for a protein can be modelled as NP-complete problem, and yet every cell in our bodies does it every second. Despite having been under enormous selection pressure to not get trapped in local optima, proteins still sometimes do that, and that can lead to prion- and amyloid-related illnesses.

That's the basic problem with all physics-based computations: systems in nature do get stuck in local optima. "This may sound silly," says Scott, "but every few months I get calls from popular science writers and they ask me, what about this? This violates Church-Turing thesis! But the things they suggest usually have the problems I mentioned."

When Scott Aaronson first heard about quantum computing as a teenager, he was similarly skeptical. He thought some physicist didn't understand Church-Turing thesis. So he had to find out about quantum mechanics for himself.

But back to Scott Aaronson's story. Setting out to learn quantum mechanics, Scott found out that quantum mechanics is not as hard to learn as it is commonly assumed. As he says, Quantum Mechanics turns out to be incredibly simple once you take the physics out of it. And no, he doesn't mean in a woo-woo New Agey sense. He adds: "The way I see it, it's a level below physics. It's an operating system that the rest of physics runs on as application. And what that OS is is probability theory with minus signs."

Scott Aaaronson's slide on quantum mechanics as probability with minus signs. It shows the double slit experiment with a smiley-faced photon going through two slits and interfering with itself.

Probabilities with minus signs" is the concept of probability amplitude, which Scott has written about in more detail in this Quantum Computing Since Democritus series article. Here, Scott shows how the concept of probability amplitude (which is an entity that can be negative) explains the phenomenon of quantum interference. Interference is what causes some "paths" that lead to an observed outcome (e.g. photon going through either slit in the famous double-slit experiment) to cancel each other, because one has a plus sign, and the other has a minus sign.

"Probabilities as complex numbers come up in the double slit experiment," says Scott. "If I close off one of the slits, the photon appears in places where it doesn't want to appear before. By decreasing the number of choices, I can increase the likehood of an event. Physicists were eventually forced to say: the photon has some amplitude for going through the first slit, and some amplitude for going through the second slit. And amplitudes are complex numbers. You have to add the amplitudes of all the slots, and then take a square. That's a positive number."

This approach to quantum mechanics leads you to learning enough quantum mechanics from the "right angle" to understand quantum computing -- and you don't need differential equations and Schrodinger's wave equation to understand it. The latter is the traditional approach to teaching quantum mechanics, and, according to Scott, it scares people away from it. "Richard Feynman in his book "QED" doesn't even mention complex numbers. He says that each path has an arrow attached, and to compute how likely that path was, you stack those arrows together. So that's a perfect example how to boil it down to a bare minimum but not lower than that," says Scott. "I've given talks about this stuff at high schools. The smarter high school students can understand a lot of it without much difficulty, part of it because there is less they have to unlearn. To get into this field you don't have to take years and years of physics, you don't have to known how to do integrals or solve differential equations. But you have to understand vectors and matrices and complex numbers. So that's the bare minimum. But that bare minimum is accessible to a much larger population of people than the people that had been traditionally thought of as being able to understand quantum mechanics."

(To be fair, not all quantum physicists agree that quantum mechanics can be taught as "probability theory with minus signs" without first introducing the wave equation and such. Here is a discussion on Quora about what is lost when you approach it that way. -- E.)

Understanding interference will also inoculate you against the biggest fallacy that's being thrown around in the popular press when explaining quantum computing. A quantum computer does not "try every answer in parallel" to arrive at the right answer. If there is one thing Scott would like you to take away from this or any of his quantum computing presentations, it is this. The quantum computer does not try every answer in parallel. It's not a massively parallel classical computer.

It is interference that lets you get the right answer out of a quantum computer. You rely on the fact that amplitudes behave not like probabilities because they can cancel each other. For every wrong answer, you hope that each path leading to the answer to have equal positive and negative amplitudes, so they could cancel each other. For the right answer we want all the paths leading to it to have either all positive or all negative amplitudes. We need to to do something to boost the probability of the right answer, and quantum interference does that. That's one new tool quantum mechanics puts in our toolbox.

This is also his bare minimum standard for popular science articles explaining quantum computing, also known as the minus sign test. The article needs to mention interference.

Though we are used to thinking about quantum computers as something that would let us solve hard problems fast, the first application of quantum computing that its pioneers conceived wasn't that at all. Their initial reason for building quantum computers was to simulate quantum systems. "In the 1980s, Feynman, Deutsch, and others noticed that a system of n qubits seems to take ~ 2^n steps to simulate on a classical computer, because of the phenomenon of entanglement between the qubits. They had the amazing idea of building a quantum computer to overcome that problem," Scott says. And now, decades after Deutsch proposed that idea, Scott Aaronson still thinks that quantum simulation is a major, perhaps the biggest and most promising, application for quantum computing. It could have huge applications for energy.

For Scott personally, the number one application is to disprove people who come to his blog and argue that quantum computing is impossible.

When people say "quantum cryptography", they typically mean one of two things: (1) Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) -- a process that lets two parties exchange cryptographic keys while guaranteeing that the keys won't be intercepted by an attacker in transit, or (2) quantum-safe cryptography, that is to say, classical encryption algorithms that can't be broken by quantum computers any faster than they could be broken by classical computers. I'm not sure which one Scott meant when he said that quantum cryptography already exists today, but there is almost no market for it, because it's a problem that's already solved by private key encryption.

As far as public-private key encryption, it relies on computational difficulty of factoring large numbers, and that is actually vulnerable to Shor's factorization algorithm, but there are many symmetric encryption algorithms (that use the same key for encryption and decryption) that don't rely on factorization and thus can't be cracked by quantum computers.

But when it comes to using quantum computing to solve any kind of problems faster, as anyone who reads Scott's blog already knows, he is very doubtful that there will be real, practical applications for quantum computing in that respect. At least not soon.

"If we were physicists, we would have declared P != NP to be a law of nature," Scott says. "But we use different terminology. Where physics have laws, we have conjectures."

Popular press sometimes states that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, but anyone who reads Scott's blog knows that's not true. The integer factorization problem that Shor's algorithm solves is not known to be NP-complete, and is suspected not to be. But can quantum computers do it at some point?

Scott Aaaronson's slide of the BQP problem class

There is a complexity class called BQP, or bounded-error quantum polynomial time. Those are problems for which exists a bounded-error polynomial time algorithm for quantum computers. "Bounded error" means that the algorithm will give a wrong answer no more than a certain percentage of times -- that percentage probably being sufficiently low, or can be brought down to be sufficiently low for practical purposes. This class of problems is bigger than P, the class of polynomially-solvable problems, but it definitely does not include the NP-complete problems -- at least nobody at present thinks that it does, and there is a lot of evidence that it doesn't. So most likely polynomial-time algorithms for NP-complete problems, even on quantum computers, don't exist.

But it's not known yet where the boundaries of BQP lie. While it includes some problems in the intermediate zone of NP problems that are not known to be P, but not known to be NP-complete either, some of these problems are very special problems. We don't even know if BQP is contained in NP. So there may be problems that quantum computer can efficiently solve, but a classical computer might not even be able to verify the answer. For that you would need another quantum computer.

D-Wave is a company that builds adiabatic quantum computers and that has claimed to achieve quantum supremacy, that is, made a quantum computer that achieves significant speedup over a classical computer for some type of problem. Scott has long been skeptical of their claims. Even if you were able to build a perfect adiabatics quantum computer, we don't know how well it would do. The quantum adiabatic algorithm was described in a 2000 paper by Farhi and other authors, and the general idea is shown in this slide by Scott. Farhi suggested that maybe it solves NP-complete problems in polynomial time, which would put NP in BQP. The iffy part is that the amount of time you need to run adiabatic algorithm depends on something called eigenvalue gap. As you vary the Hamiltonian, what is is the smallest gap between its first and second eigenvalues? If that gap becomes exponentially small, you need to run it for an exponential time. "And some people were able to construct problems for which this gap becomes exponentially small," says Scott.

"After you've seen problems with NP-completeness, you are tempted to elevated [computational] hardness as a fundamental physics problem. You would ask, what implication it would have for physics? And now we know some examples: for example, in condensed matter systems spectral gaps would have to become exponentially small," says Scott Aaraonson.

For the last some number of years D-Wave has been trying to find problems for which adiabatic algorithm would be exponentially faster than a classical algorithm. Scott is quite skeptical that they have found any. In the previous quantum computing meetup, though, Brian La Cour from UT Austin said he thought it wasn't so clear-cut, because the recent D-Wave advancements make it less apparent that there is a classical algorithm that would do just as well. But it's not that Scott is skeptical about adiabatic algorithms altogether. "We may not understand the potential of adiabatic algorithm until we have a real quantum computer," he says.

Scott Aaronson's areas of research

Scott's own research area is quantum supremacy, that is, finding quantum algorithms that for some types of problems provide a definite speedup over any classical algorithm. And by the way, he got a lot of comedic mileage out of that phrase during the Trump campaign year.

A year ago Scott wrote this paper connecting quantum computation to the black hole firewall problem. He briefly mentioned it and said that there wasn't enough time to discuss it at this presentation. This left me and some other people in the audience with a cliffhanger feeling. Just when we got to hearing something we had not heard about before, the lecture was over! Some of us asked Scott about that paper later after the talk, and he pointed us to more information about the paper on his blog.

Questions from the audience

Unfortunately, the questions were nearly impossible to hear, because the audience members didn't have a microphone. So I could only guess the general topic they asked about.

Q1. About quantum entanglement.

Scott Aaronson. I didn't say much about entanglement in this talk. In quantum mechanics entanglement is not a separate rule you have to postulate. It's just something that's there for a ride. It's just that entanglement means that in QM you can't write a state of a qubits as a product state.

If qubits are not entangled, you don't have a quantum computer. You can simulate it easily with a classical computer. Entanglement is a necessary but insufficient condition for QM.

Q2. About decoherence, the problem that makes quantum computing so hard to implement in practical terms.

Scott Aaronson. A crucial discovery from the nineties was that you don't have to get your decoherence rate down to 0. You just need to get it down to very very low rate. So even if some small number of qubits will leak out into environment, the quantum information that you care about is still there.

Q3. About machine learning and quantum computing.

Scott acknowledged that quantum computing might seem like a natural fit for quantum computing. "In a way, machine learning is all about linear algebra in high-dimensional spaces, and so is quantum computing. But you always have to ask, if someone can simulate a quantum machine learning algorithm with a classical approach, would they really a get a speedup from the quantum computing algorithm?"

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Dr. Brian La Cour from University of Texas at Austin gave a presentation on the latest state of quantum computing to Austin's Quantum Computing meetup in March of 2017. Here are some prominent points from it.

Several big companies are getting into quantum computing now: Google, Microsoft, IBM. There are significant differences between their approaches.

Google plans to solve a problem with 49 qubits, a problem that would demonstrate quantum supremacy (getting a clear speedup with a quantum algorithm over a classical algorithm), but is completely useless in real life. The problem with that is that when you progress to the quantum supremacy frontier, you can no longer check the answer with a regular device. Or it would take a very long time. So Google's argument will probably be based on asymptotic trend, with how they are doing with more qubits. But overall this problem of how to check the results will be more difficult in the future.

We are a long way from solving Shor's algorithm and breaking internet's encryption. But quantum simulation is a near term application. It goes back to Richard Feynman's discussions of quantum computing. We can simulate things on a digital computer, but it's not very efficient. When you want to add another spin, another atom, you have to double the memory. What better thing to simulate a quantum system than a quantum system?

There is a difference between gate-based quantum computing (like what IBM and partially Google does) and quantum annealing, like what D-Wave does, and partially Google.

Gate-based device (that operates on gates, similar to classical gates) is a universal quantum computer. D-Wave's computer is specialized, it is only useful for certain optimization problems. And so far those problems have been pretty contrived, not necessarily corresponding to anything in real life. Even so there is no definitive evidence that the D-Wave's computer is advantageous for solving specific practical problems, as compared to classical solvers. There is a professor somewhere who, every time when D-Wave claimed that their quantum computer was solving some problems more efficiently, took it as a challenge to find a classical algorithm that would beat it. And so far he has been successful. But lately this has become less clear, because he has been, in Brian's words "exploiting what he knows about the problem". (Mathematicians and computer scientists can make it sound like it's a bad thing. But perhaps he means that while the professor is exploiting special knowledge about a problem, the quantum annealing computer can't make use of that knowledge, thus he is not comparing apples to apples? -- E.)

IARPA -- funding agency for intelligence community, analogy of DARPA -- is focused on developing next-generation quantum annealing, a universal quantum annealer. Their goal is, can you take benchmark projects and scale them to the thousands of qubits that D-Wave has?

Microsoft is looking at high-level languages for quantum computing. They are designing high-level languages that optimize what low-level languages do. They also do their own research into topological quantum computing, which is a very different approach than the qubit-based QC, but Brian thinks that's technologically so far away it's probably never going to happen.

This brings us to another Brian La Cour point, which is that now is a good time even for ordinary software developers to get involved in quantum computing, and you don't have to be a researcher to do it. There are people who are building interfaces in conventional programming languages to QASM, IBM's Quantum assembly language. This is where you as an individual can make a contribution: figure out how to do things in QASM and implement an interface to it in your favorite language. Also, individuals can play around with the IBM's Quantum Experience, a web interface to the IBM's quantum computer, and familiarity with it could put you in a position to get a job at some company that does quantum computing (not that there are many of those currently -- E.).

According to Brian, quantum gamification is also a trend. However, he used the word "gamification" not the way it is typically used (to incentivize certain user behaviors by making them seem like a game). He meant it more literally in the sense of games that teach you something about quantum mechanics. In some of those games people perform actions that help quantum researchers. Here are some examples:

www.scienceathome.org

qCraft -- a "mod" to the popular Minecraft game. It uses "quantum blocks" to teach superposition, observation, and entanglement.

There are even games that have been programmed on IBM Quantum Experience, such as Quantum Battleship.

Decodoku was developed to help researchers with quantum error correction. You are protecting researchers from errors.

cat-paper-scissors game (I could not find it by googling -- E.)

Quantum Cats from University of Waterloo, Canada. It's like angry birds, except cats can be in superpositions.

Brian La Cour noted that not only quantum computing research is strong in Canada, Canadian QC scientists also do a lot of educational outreach. US scientists don't do nearly as much, but they should.

As always, the least predictable part of any presentation is the audience's questions, and Brian got a few of those.

Brian replied that he has heard about it, but that there wasn't any connection there to quantum computing. It was just another unconventional way to compute. Apropos of unconventional computing, quantum computing in a way is a throwback to analog computing: encoding information in continuous variables, except what comes out is still digital.

Audience member. Can quantum computing be used to mine bitcoins?

Aside from currently existing quantum computers being nowhere near powerful enough to mine bitcoins, Brian also noted that the value of bitcoin is based on the fact that bitcoins are computationally difficult to find. So if you find an algorithm to mine them fast and reliably, it will devalue them.

Audience member. How big a leap is it to go from classical programming to quantum programming? Is it a totally different beast?

Brian. It is a totally different beast. If you try to do things like conditionals and loops, you are doing it wrong. Instead of conditionals you have control gates, where value of one qubit controls what happens to another qubit. Which is sort of like conditional, but linear. A qubit in a superposition of 0/1 controls another qubit which is also in superposition.

The way you think about quantum computing is taking your entire data space, or state space, and think about it all at once.

You initialize all to 0 and apply Hadamard gates all at once. It puts them in superposition of all possible states, and then you do operation on them. You are looking at the whole haystack and apply operations to the whole haystack until you find a needle. You don't examine each value and look whether it's a needle.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

You walk into the BodyHackingCon on an early Sunday afternoon, and you are not sure if it's really still going on. You expect it to have a bigger, or at least flashier presence: shouldn't there be people with highly visible body modifications milling about? Instead, you see people in business casual whose name tags say "superintendent", and the hallways are plastered with signs for Texas School Boards convention. But you persist and walk around a corner, and then down a city-block-long corridor around another corner (that's Austin Convention Center for you), and you are finally rewarded by a hand-scrawled sign pointing towards an open door of a huge, warehouse-style expo room. But this is the last day of a 3-day convention, so naturally most of the vendors are gone.

Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin

There is still a thing or two happening; at one of the booths a visitor is trying to pull together the edges of a peculiar-looking vest around his torso; it clearly is not going to happen, since the vest is 3-4 sizes too small. "I'm sorry. We are planning to have larger sizes in the future," says a vendor at the booth, even though the guy is merely average size. But apparently the vest does not need to close to work. It is studded with small metal circles that make up some kind of haptic language interface. That's only my guess based on what I could glean from the snippets of conversation. Because who needs to ask how it works when you can speculate?

"Whip. Angle," says the booth guy. "Whip. Angle." Then he turns a phone screen to the guy who's trying out the vest. There are two circles on it, and he asks the guy to pick one to tap on. Apparently the booth guy made the dots convey some kind of haptic stimulation (e.g. buzzing?) -- and asked the wearer to recognize the word encoded in it. He praises the wearer for answering correctly. "So you see, it's not just the length of the word," he says. I guess he was saying that the vest made it possible, with some minimal training, to distinguish the actual word pattern, not just a longer word from a shorter word?

A jacket with a ribcage headpiece? This would make a splash at a science fiction convention.

Then you look around some more, and even with most vendors gone and large patches of the expo hall square footage reverting to its post-convention beige bleakness, you still see something unusual. At another exhibitor's booth, flanking it on both sides, two women are lying on the tables, looking for all the world like wax statues. Their eyes are covered with something that could be a sleep mask or a VR headset. You glance at the vendor's name -- bio- or healing-something -- and think it's more likely to be a mask. By the way, the name matches a definite pattern: half of the exhibitors' names here have "bio", or "quantum", or something vaguely medical in a New Agey way. Which is fitting, given that half of them sell nothing more than nutrition drinks and supplements.

You stumble upon exhibits of clothes that wouldn't be out of place a goth or punk store, except they have patches with wires sticking out, like something that's placed on you right before a surgery. Some also light up. Many would make a stunning costume at a science fiction convention, if you could spawn off a third or fourth alter ego to explore your mild interest in costuming. Overall, this is the bodyhacking you could get behind -- the kind that stays entirely outside the body.

Most of those clothes are art projects. One dress claims to simulate dark matter: "Dark Matter inflates and deflates against your body to simulate the universe expanding against you, and the buzzing sculptural universal necklace, "Dark Energy", buzzes against your skin to simulate movement through the universe in time in accordance with events happening in VR". But you have read enough science fiction and imagined the vast cosmic space enough times that you know if you put on that dress (not that it's an option) the experience would fall very short of feeling at the center of the expanding universe.

A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, resembling uncannily of surgical preparations.

Some of the clothes have VR content associated with it accessible through your phone; and perhaps you could spend some interesting minutes with it, but just downloading the app would take some time, and the WiFi connection in this building is iffy, and the event is winding down and you are sure vendors are anxious to pack up and leave.

Finally on the way out you get a glimpse of a more radical kind of bodyhacking: a guy you pass in the hallway has small, but prominent devil's horns under the skin of his bald forehead.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

This is a book about a time-travelling serial killer and a woman who survives her own murder attempt and sets out to catch him. The most interesting part is that she doesn't even consider time travel as a possibility (the book is set in the conventional reality), but gradually comes to accept it, based on evidence.

The weakest chapters of the book were the ones written from the killer's point of view. Those parts have a detached, distancing quality. I didn't get any clue as to the killer's motivation. At some point he feels forced by the House itself (a house where he lives that serves as a portal to different eras) to go murder all those women. But he does not respond like an ordinary person would if they felt compelled to murder someone. At the very least s/he would be upset and conflicted about it. Even more so if the urge was planted directly in their mind by a mysterious force. That should make anyone question their own sanity, but the murderer does not seem disturbed. He is very nonchalant about all that.

If the killer had been portrayed in a way that readers could connect with him (and yes, to enjoy a book you have to connect with the villains too; you need to get into their mind and understand why they do what they do, even if you don't find it justifiable), I would have added another star to the review.

It is in the victims' plotlines that the storytelling really picks up. Each of the eight murdered women were interesting, different, and vivid. They made the book worth reading. It quickly became clear why they were called the Shining Girls. Each of them was ahead of her time in some way, breaking the mold of what was expected from women of their time. In that way perhaps the House could be viewed as embodiment of evil reactionary forces of the world. But if so, that metaphor isn't developed in the book very well.

The story really takes off when one of the women survives the attempted murder and gets on the killer's trail; as level-headed as she is, she is eventually forced to accept the evidence that the killer might have traveled in time to commit murders. I really liked that she applies every ounce of skepticism to examine all the other possible explanations, and only after exhausting them settles on the seemingly impossible.

I will not reveal the ending, except to say that it was a quite confusing. Perhaps that was deliberate: time travel stories are very difficult to resolve in a satisfactory and logical manner. Once you start dealing with time paradoxes, there is no good way out. So even though the ending felt handwavingly dismissive and intentionally obscure, it doesn't detract from the story that much; its essence was about the journey, not the destination.

Amanda Downum. I am a fan of playing with subtle things, instead of bringing a hammer. I like Trojan horses. I like books with an array of women doing an array of interesting things. Not just having one special woman, because then it becomes a token.

Stina Leicht. I'm like you. I don't like having one special, kickass token female character to who nothing bad can happen. (She refers to Arya from Game of Thrones as an example of a female character that's singled out for special treatment.) Arya is great! She's never going to be raped!

Amanda Downum. I like the normalization of women doing things.

Caroline Yoachim. I like a wider range of cultures represented in SF.

Amanda Downum. I also have hard time pulling feminist out of broader range of cultures. (Perhaps she meant that it is impossible to dissociate diversity of cultures from feminism. -- E.)

Caroline Yoachim. The broadening of feminism in science fiction is a good thing.

Nancy Jane Moore. [I like that] We finally moved away for the reality where white male is the default, and anyone else's existence needs to be justified.

Stina Leicht. Minorities and women are historically not permitted anger. You're supposed to have a sense of humor, laugh it off.

Nancy Jane Moore. The same issue as with Sandra Bland dying in a jail cell. She was not permitted to get angry when she got pulled over.

Stina Leicht. When the Hunger Games movie was made, a lot of people got upset, because they were convinced that Rue was white. They thought it was not OK for her to be a person of color.

Amanda Downum. You can describe your character very clearly, and some readers will still sail past what you're trying to do. (I think she means that some readers will visualize your character as white even if you described him or her as a person of color, simply because white is the default to them. -- E.)

Caroline Yoachim. It's tricky. I'm half Japanese, and I write a lot of Asian characters. But you don't want to bludgeon people with the character's race. When you're writing a modern Japense American character, they don't have to have a traditional Japanese name. And people will automatically whitewash it.

Stina Leicht. It happened to Ursula LeGuin, the Earthsea wizard -- people assumed he was white.

Amanda Downum. One of the things that frustrated me in science fiction is that people stop questioning. They have their speculative idea, their fantasy world, but then they don't question and push -- they just stop. They found one thing they wanted to write about, and they don't think that anything else can be different. You have a world you are creating from scratch, so why don't you push yourself to imagine more? Why your gender relationships are like from the 1950s America?

Nancy Jane Moore. Academic book "Brain Storm" by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young -- most of research that find brain differences between men and women are bad science. When you look at differences among people, they don't break down along gender lines.

Amanda Downum. When you're a shallow writer, you're a shallow writer. It manifests in more than just not being able to write female characters.

Maureen McHugh: short story collections "After the Apocalypse", "Mothers and Other Monsters".

Nancy Jane Moore recommends:

"Necessary Ill" by Deb Taber. Her main character is a neuter. The neutter people go by "it". They are neither male nor female. They don't have genitals. They do very disturbing things. It is a disturbing book , and that's the greatest recommendation I can give for a book.

Amanda Downum. Talking about characters doing unpleasant things: I would like to have a discussion about female characters doing unpleasant things, and how audiences respond to them.

Stina Leicht. Women are people, and part of being people is making terrible mistakes. It happens, and it needs to be OK in the books.

Questions from the audience

Q1. How do you like the treatment of those issues in film?

Nancy Jane Moore. 10 minutes of Fury Road was a great movie. Overall I think film is way behind fiction.

All the panelists agree.

Amanda Downum. Marketing constraints, etc.

Stina Leicht. And there are very limited roles for women once they hit 35.

Caroline Yoachim. Also, other contraints like race, sexuality. When we celebrate the broad range of female characters in the books, that's totally not true for film.

Nancy Jane Moore. The only SF movie I liked last year was "Her". It is not feminist, but it is going someplace really interesting science fictionally. And the best feminist film of the last years is "Obvious Child", which is not science fiction.

Q2.Do you have high hopes for Ghostbusters?

Stina Leicht. I really don't, sorry to say. What does it say that our best feminist movei hope is a movie that's completely lacks in plot? It is just explosions. A woman driving a monster truck. I don't like what Hollywood is doing where we rehash everything. Hollywood caters to the established audiences, and they don't take chances.

They mention Geena Davis institute for women in film, and it is doing good work.

Q3 (not really a question, but a remark). A movie that was very interesting from feminist perspective was "The Age of Avalon" -- about a woman who doesn't age, and the difficulties she's going to have. She comes across one of her former lovers, who is 65, but she still looks 29. And she's dating his son.

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About Me

A geekess by profession and personality. Torn in many different directions: programming, writing fiction and nonfiction, publishing, blogging. I blog about about science fiction (not the Star Trek kind, but the "thought experiment" kind), science, technology (mostly Austin, TX tech events), and freethought, among other things. My "official" blog, SFragments, contains in-depth articles on various topics discussed at science fiction conventions and author events; this one is more personal and covers a wider range of topics, including technology events in Austin, TX, startups, applications, and technology.